Abstracts, Past Meetings
XVI, Leiden: Recent Science and Technology
Johan Schot:
The Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit: Making Connections
This is a pioneering collaborative project in which historians and cultural heritage institutions throughout Europe together tell a new history of Europe. Following the paths of technology from the transport and communication revolutions of the nineteenth century through to the present day the online exhibit has been built and is being developed further to show to a wide range of users the ways technology has shaped Europe--and the ways Europe has shaped technology.
Based on research from the six-part book series Making Europe: Technology and Transformations 1850-2000, the virtual exhibit explores the broad themes of globalization, consumption, communication, infrastructures, knowledge societies, and governance. The exhibit connects these scientific stories to rich and growing online collections of museums, archives and libraries throughout Europe and beyond. The exhibit, developed at Imperial College, London, allows participating museums to share relevant content from their online collections quickly and easily.
These appear as static objects within the exhibit, forming the basis for one of the twenty four stories. Or they appear as related objects next to the stories, serving as a portal for further exploration on the websites of our cultural heritage partners. One of the most pressing problems of the exhibit has been to make connections between a large number of stakeholders, topics, as well as the digital museum objects.
Johan Schot is professor in social history of technology at Eindhoven University of Technology, and scientific director of the Foundation for the History of Technology. He also co-directs the Foundation for Systems Innovation (KSI).
Jennifer S. Landry:
After the Doors Opened: Reevaluating the Collecting Strategy for CHF
The opening of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s new museum and first permanent exhibition in October 2008 signaled a strategic shift for the organization from a primarily research-based institution to an increasingly public-focused organization. The development of the exhibition provided the first opportunity for CHF to look critically at its artifact collections and think about how its significant collection of electronic-era instrumentation would be interpreted and understood by curators, museum visitors and researchers. The curatorial staff discovered during the museum development process that, in order for the artifacts to have relevance to the general public as well as scholarly research value, we needed to collect artifacts and complementary materials that helped communicate human stories and the social impact of science on our world. In the three years since opening the museum, CHF curatorial staff have reexamined our scope, our targeted collecting initiatives, and how we determine what we actually collect--this study has led to fundamental changes in our philosophy on collecting artifacts and supporting materials that document recent chemical history. This presentation will examine the revised and still-evolving collecting strategy and how CHF intends to use the new collecting strategy to actively seek and collect modern chemical history.
Jennifer Landry is Associate Director of Special Collections of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Ad Maas:
The Unilever collection and the dilemma’s of collecting modern chemical heritage
The research laboratory of Dutch-British multinational Unilever, located in the city of Vlaardingen, belongs to the most important industrial laboratories of twentieth century Netherlands. It specialized, in particular, on research on margarine and washing-powder, resulting in such well-known products as Becel and Omo.
In my presentation I will discuss the historical collection of the Unilever research laboratory that has recently been acquired by Museum Boerhaave, the Dutch national museum for the history of science and medicine. This collection reflects the typical challenges put to museums by the chemical heritage of the modern time: it consists largely of mass-produced bulk instruments, which are moreover hard to understand for laymen. I will argue that, rather than from their ‘intrinsic’ qualities (esthetic value, rarity, intriguing working, etc.), these instruments derive their value from the story they represent. They are ‘key-pieces’--- ‘keys’ to a story behind them--- rather than showpieces.
I will explain how this ‘key-pieces approach’ has assisted in making an appropriate selection of instruments for the collection of Museum Boerhaave. And I will discuss particular examples of instruments that illustrate Unilever research well, and elaborate on the intriguing Unilever-history that they represent.
Ad Maas is curator at Museum Boerhaave. He specialized in history of physics and the history of the Dutch scientific culture.
Bryan Dewalt:
Sound and Light Show: Curating an Exhibit on Current Science
In October 2011 the Canada Science and Technology Museum will open a small exhibit exploring the work of two Canadian scientists working in the field of optical sensors. Dr. Hans-Peter Loock is a chemist studying the use of fibre Bragg gratings (FBG) for photoacoustic spectroscopy. Dr. Raman Kashyap is working with multimode interferometry (MMI) to create a strain sensor. The common thread that appeals to the museum is that both researchers are using musical instruments as the test beds for their work.
Loock’s FBG guitar pickup and Kashyap’s fibre optic guitar string provide an engaging means of demonstrating to visitors the connection between vibration, an optical sensor and the spectral characteristics of the resulting light signals and audio output. My presentation to Artefacts 2011 will explore the challenges faced by the curator and exhibit team in developing this exhibit, including the paucity of related artefacts in the collection, an extremely compressed development schedule and modest budget, and the difficulty of interpreting esoteric concepts to a lay museum audience. It will also address how this sort of project epitomizes the array of demands placed on modern museums of science and technology: the patriotic mission of celebrating national scientific stars; the educational mission of promoting public understanding of science; the national economic strategy of encouraging scientific and technical innovation; the institutional imperative to demonstrate “relevance” to reluctant government patrons; and the strategic drive to cement financial and intellectual links with external, science-based organizations and corporations. These demands, and the types of exhibitions that museums produce in response to them, all impinge uncomfortably on a curatorial profession committed to the material culture of science and technology and the plurality of meanings that emerge from a properly historicized study of artefacts.
Bryan Dewalt is the Curator of Communications at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. His research interests focus on technology and the labour process and communication technologies as tools of cultural practice.
Peter Donhauser:
Radio transmitter stations of the 1930s as industrial heritage
Radio is still a recent technology but little attention is paid to an essential part of the system: the transmitter stations. The consequence is that these stations are widely disregarded as industrial archaeological objects, while they should be regarded as documents of media history and shown to the public.
The problem: they have to remain at their original site. So the few remaining large European radio transmitter stations built before 1945 are in danger of destruction. The author undertook considerable of research when he had to write a detailed account about an Austrian station of 1942, helping to declare it as historic monument. Most of the existing stations are owned by private organizations like radio companies, have not been used for decades and are cost-intensive to maintain. On the other hand, they belong to the industrial heritage and are documents of media, cultural and political history (esp. in Germany). Preserving these stations in situ turns out to be difficult, expensive and difficult to explain to the public. The stations usually are situated away from large cities. So even larger museums usually are shy of running them as an outpost, and private societies are overstrained upholding them as private radio museums. So often parts of the transmitter stations are shown in a decontextualized way: some museum exhibits are analysed and discussed for they are often unconvincing.
Peter Donhauser is head of collections for physics, musical instruments, medical technology, measuring instruments etc. at the Vienna Museum of Technology, and Associate lecturer at the Vienna University.
Cathleen Lewis:
Collecting a Spacesuit in the 21st Century: When a Partial Artifact Tells More of a Story than the Whole Thing
The American extravehicular spacesuit is featured in the many photographs of astronauts assembling the International Space Station (ISS) and the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. The Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) consists of two major systems: The Space Suit Assembly (SSA) and the Life Support System (LSS). Unlike previous generations of spacesuits, the EMU is not custom made for individual astronauts. It consists of interchangeable and reusable components that each astronaut chooses to fit his or her body. Several sizes of each major component are manufactured and placed on the shelf for future use. In 1974 NASA had dictated that the suit be “compact, reusable, robust, and cost-effective” with standardized sizing that would fit all astronaut candidates ranging from the 5th percentile among females and the 95th percentile among males.
Now that NASA is releasing components of the EMU to museums as artifacts, there is a distinct pattern in their offerings. In contrast to expectations in the early 1970s in the afterglow of the Apollo program; NASA is not in a rush to have completed SSAs on display in museums throughout the world.
The NASA-GSA screening outlet offers glove components most frequently with occasional pieces of thermal micrometeoroid garment sprinkle throughout. Gloves remain the only semi-custom made components in the EMU. Nothing that NASA has offered to date has flown in space; all have seen ground testing and bear markings as not for flight. All are artifacts of the agency’s demand for reusable and robust components—tested for durability that would exceed NASA’s contractual expectations.
NASA’s strategy on the disposition of Shuttle spacesuit omponents disappoints our Apollo-era expectations of full-up recreations of shuttle history in museums. However, it does reveal significant underlying trends surrounding modern NASA spacesuit operations. In this century spacesuits are no longer the products of Cold War cooperation between industry and NASA to complete a project as quickly as possible with the material at hand. The suits are no longer the outfits of distinct Cold War heroes. The EMU represents one of a multitude of tools and equipment that astronauts use in their routine Earth-orbiting space work. A modern story about NASA spacesuits might best be illustrated by incomplete spacesuits that tell the stories of reusability, robustness and interchangeability.
Cathleen Lewis is Curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, specializing in Soviet and Russian programs.
Valerie Neal:
Mission Accomplished or Mission Impossible? Collecting Spaceflight Artifacts of the Shuttle Era
Since 2009, NASA has released the first few thousand of some six million artifacts from the Space Shuttle program inventory. The numbers are staggering and the acquisition opportunity is unprecedented. How can a museum sort through this vast universe of material culture, winnow out the truly significant artifacts, and make judicious choices that will stand the test of time?
Intimate experience with spaceflight technologies and operations, and with the panorama of space history, make a good but insufficient launch pad for decision-making. A collecting plan must be informed by relevant historical research and exhibition plans and some consideration for future interests. Curators must be mindful of compelling questions in the history of science and technology history that Shuttle artifacts may help to illuminate, and likewise mindful of the social, cultural, and technological narratives that their museums seek to address.
As the principal repository for America’s history of aviation and spaceflight, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has wrestled with this challenge for years in anticipation of the end of the Shuttle era. Shuttle curator and space historian Valerie Neal will present the intellectual and practical scheme that is guiding, and sometimes frustrating, the Museum’s collecting effort.
Valerie Neal engages in historical research, artifact collection, and exhibition development focused on human spaceflight in the Space Shuttle era at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum.
Thomas Söderqvist:
COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing as alternatives to centralised collecting
Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.
Thomas Söderqvist is professor in the history of medicine and Director of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. He is a specialist in the history and historical methodology of 20th century life sciences and medicine.
Joseph Tatarewicz and Joyce Bedi:
Training Practitioners: Actors, Artifacts,, and Public Expectations
While both the history of science and technology and public history are booming, attention to the interface is mainly confined to a small band of specialists who communicate largely among themselves. The authors collaborated recently on a graduate course designed to expand this conversation by training advanced students to combine material culture research with various explanatory approaches beyond narrative, while simultaneously addressing the challenges of interpreting science and technology for a public accustomed to straightforward storytelling in exhibition and media production. This paper reports some surprising results from that effort, and questions whether the standard historiography is adequate to inform and guide collection, exhibition, and outreach. The authors consider the role that meta-narrative approaches may serve for students, preservers, and interpreters of the manuscript and material legacy of science and technology, and ask whether the general public is ready for such a shift. As museum professionals and academics who have shuttled between those worlds our entire careers, we sought to expose students to the sorts of beyond-narrative historiographies and techniques that have swept our field in recent decades and assess whether one could ever employ them in exhibitions and public outreach. The same applies to criteria of selection for the material culture to be preserved: if document and artifact preservation is based on our historical conclusions about their contexts of production, what happens if one makes curatorial decisions on, say, social construction or actor-network theory rather than narrative? Thus, we tried to move the students toward a more sophisticated and nuanced level of engagement with the "breadth and diversity of material culture associated with recent science and technology" that incorporated new approaches from material studies, the STS literature and philosophy of technology.
Joseph N. Tatarewicz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Director of its Human Context of Science and Technology program.
Joyce Bedi is Senior Historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.
Roland Wittje:
Recent scientific heritage at universities
In my presentation I will to address the specific challenges, but also the opportunities of preserving recent scientific heritage at universities. Within a changing landscape of research institutions and research practices, universities continue to be a main actor, as well as the primary provider of higher scientific and technical training. With the Bologna Process, decreasing state support, and funding models from the corporate world, European universities are under severe pressure. While many of the old and prestigious universities are well aware of the value and importance of their historic heritage, there is little albeit growing awareness regarding the need to preserve recent scientific heritage. One major challenge of preserving recent heritage is the vast expansion of universities in the postwar period. Another is the changing character of teaching and research.
Several universities have started to conduct surveys to capture the amount of scientific heritage outside established historical collections and museums. These surveys show the urgent need for new documentation and collection practices in order to cope with the vast amount of recent material, as well as for collaboration with other institutions involved in conceptualizing, collecting and presenting recent science and technology.
Roland Wittje is lecturer in history of science at the University of Regensburg, Germany. From March to September 2011 he is Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London.
Louise Whiteley:
Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process
Functional neuroimaging research aims to reveal the physical basis of the mind. Since the late 1980s, functional neuroimaging has been a prominent player in contemporary neuroscience, and its strong public profile and invocation in policy contexts also argue for the importance of preserving and engaging with its material culture. Yet brain scanners are not natural museum objects; huge, heavy, and expensive, their most salient sensory qualities derive from the operation of a giant magnet cooled by helium gas and encased in a shielded room. Here I argue that attending to the trajectory from experiment design to data presentation offers us an array of new objects to consider, and new possibilities for engagement with this potent technology. I discuss the collection of computer tasks designed to recreate phenomena such as love or religious experience in the scanner; of objects such as vats of earplugs, restraining cages, and stimulus delivery devices; and of brain scans considered as contingent endpoints of fluid, computational analysis. Finally, I consider how distributed curation of such ‘objects of process’ could bring into productive interaction the interests of neuroscientists, visitors, and a developing critical discourse about the social implications of neuroimaging that is already challenging boundaries of expertise.
Louise Whiteley is an Assistant Professor at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. She has a PhD in Neuroscience and MSc in Science Communication.
Peter Schüßler:
The collection-related oral history project at Deutsches Museum
Current scientific devices and recent technologies are creasingly intransparent in respect of their function. At the same time the “individual” history of the single object remains hidden to the beholder. Thus research, documentation and presentation of scientific-technical objects in the museum require new concepts and strategies. In this sense Deutsches Museum tests an extended documentation of its collections through oral history.
Different sources are consulted for documentation of artefacts in the museum so far, for example completed research or archival sources. The aim is an almost complete compilation of information. Nevertheless some questions on technical details and function remain unanswered. Beyond that the object might get classified within a temporal, spatial or social framework, but the most part of its “individuality” remains in the shadows. In order to achieve further information about the objects of collection, the documentation through written sources should get extended by oral sources, for example interviews with inventors, users or former owners.
The museum curators are to be enabled to conduct interviews independently, without much preparation and to record them in picture and sound. A new method of documentation through oral history is to be tested: the project aims to explore which new knowledge on the objects, their function and their history is generated through the interviews and which surplus value the extended documentation offers regarding exhibition concepts and knowle dge transfer.
Peter Schüßler is a Sociologist of Science and Technology. Since 2006 he has been a research associate at the Deutsches Museum.
Olov Amelin:
Against Method, A story based policy for collecting artefacts from Nobel laureates.
In 2001 the Nobel Museum in Stockholm was opened to the public. Right from the beginning discussions started whether the museum should be a collecting institution or a mere informative institution. The answer was given by reality itself. Artefacts were donated to the museum right from the beginning and soon enough we started to approach Nobel laureates immediately after the announcement in early October. Today the museum holds a fantastic collection spanning over all Nobel prize areas, including peace, literature and economics. What keeps the collection together is the stories attached to the artefact. We try to interview all the donors and the stories we collect are today, in many cases, even more important than the physical object.
Olov Amel is Museum Director, Nobel Museum, Stockholm Sweden.
Margaret Vining and Barton C. Hacker:
A Look Askance: Military and Medical Technology in th e Satiric Art of Garry Trudeau
The social environments of technology are no less important than the physical manifestations. The Division of Armed Forces History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History regularly augments its collection of weapons and other paraphernalia with representations of the technology in use. Included in this category are editorial cartoons by modern masters such as Bill Mauldin and Herblock. Recently Garry Trudeau donated a series of “Doonesbury” comic strips to the collections. The widely syndicated satiric strip has contributed a large and varied community of Doonesbury characters to American popular culture, many having become cultural icons. Strong antiwar themes characterize the strip, combined with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the men and women who serve. Since 2002 Trudeau’s cartoons have explored the traumas and travails of soldiers injured in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, “wounded warriors.” Contemporary military, medical, and related technologies figure prominently in “Doonesbury,” sometimes even taking center stage. We will use this collection as a springboard for an illustrated discussion of how these technologies have impacted the lives of American soldiers, both male and female, in the ongoing Middle Eastern wars.
Margaret Vining, MA. is curator of armed forces history at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. In addition to women's military history, she specializes in the material culture of the US Armed forces.
Barton C. Hacker, is curator of armed forces history at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. In addition to women's military history, he specializes in the social history of military technology and the history of nonwestern military institutions.
Martin Collins, Robert Bud, Helmuth Trischler, Klaus Staubermann, Thomas Söderqvist:
Panel discussion
Should Artefacts cooperatively develop a strategy for collecting recent science and technology?
This meeting, and other recent European meetings, have brought forward the challenge of devising strategies and programs to collect the material record of recent science and technology. Can or should Artefacts, as consortium, undertake a collaborative project to develop guidelines or cooperative approaches to collecting? How might this be accomplished? Are there similar collaborative projects that we might use as models? Would it serve the interests of individual museums? In this period of diminished resources could it be accomplished?